Money Manager Ex – Talk about Financial Planning…

Sometimes I really wonder where my money goes, why it won’t stick to my wallet? I tried everything – I polish my wallet so it looks nice and new, I put some perfume into my wallet so it smells nice, I throw out all the unneccessary rubbish out of my wallet, all these is just to create a nice and harmony living place for my money… but it just don’t want to stay there. So I realize that I must find another way… perhaps Money Manager Ex would help…

Money Manager Ex (MME) is a simple financial management/plannning application that allows you to record your daily transaction, yearly budgeting, view or analyze expenses trend, etc. Download it from here and install it.

First create a database for all your financial record to store.

Then you will go through a wizard for the initialization, for eg, the base currency and an initial account. You can click on the “New Account” button to add in few more accounts later.

Here is the example on creating accounts. I created all the account that I have current, which are “Savings – MBB”, “Visa – HSBC”, “Homeloan – HLB”, and “Cash on hand”. By creating this way, you can track the real transaction history on your real life account. Of course there are other way, just use your creativity in managing the accounts.

Next you should define a list of payee, which is the party that you pay the money to, or, receive the money from.

And then you should define the categories of the expenses. The application already has some pre-defined categories, if you are not so picky, just use them.

Finally, you can start recording your transaction. Remember to record your expenses daily and make sure the amount of money you hold is tally with the amount that you are recorded, or else it will be meaningless for doing such action.

It has plenty types of reports to view and analyze.

If you found that the reports cannot satisfied you, there is a custorm SQL report feature to allow you generate a custome report. Of course you need to have some SQL knowledge to do this. MMEX is using SQLite as the database, just download some database manager for SQLite (for example Sqliteman) to help you inspect the database structure and generate the SQL statement.

Conclusion : Well MMEX is not a professional accounting tools, so it won’t help you do balance sheet. It’s just a simple tool that help small family or individual to keep track on the financial status. It works perfectly for me and I hope it works for you too 🙂